Publisher and External Applications

All organizations incur some degree of risk as a result of performing normal business operations. Some operations, because of the types of data used, or because of the criticality of the service being performed, come with more risk than others.

External Application Evaluation Request

In order to prudently manage the college’s business process risk and to evaluate the impact of a new application within the existing Blackboard service configuration, we must first evaluate the risk of doing business with external service providers. Considerations include accessibility, security, administration, copyright, compatibility, cost, Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), interoperability, and support plan. 

This process can be time consuming since it requires scheduling and collaboration with the vendor and faculty requester(s) to research and test on our Blackboard test system prior to installation on the production system. Please consider the time required to evaluate, test, and deploy a third-party app when submitting your request: 

• Fall semester: submit request by May 1 
• Winter/Spring semester: submit request by September 1 
• Summer sessions: submit request by February 1 

External Application Support

The Center for Instructional Technology will provide technical troubleshooting for any error messages displayed within Blackboard and ensure that all integrations are properly configured per vendor documentation. We will fully test all integrations possible given vendor constraints. Users will be referred to the third-party vendor customer service support for external application support and issues with access codes or accounts outside of Blackboard.